


In Sure and Certain Hope

by searchforthescars



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, and two prompts squished together, just a shit ton of speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28600671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars/pseuds/searchforthescars
Summary: “Everything here dies. But you, Gideon... you have lived. You are a living, breathing creature inside a mausoleum that is sleeping inside a burial ground.”You say nothing. Harrow’s little bird-sized chest is heaving under the weight of your rage. “Ashes to ashes,” the woman muses, “but that’s not how this universe dies.”OR: My ode to what happens when you wake up inside a mausoleum constructed for you and behold the architect who has abandoned her work.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 56





	In Sure and Certain Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dilapidatedcorvid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/gifts).



> This holiday exchange piece is very special to me, as I was assigned my dear friend [dilapidatedcorvid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid) and thus had a bit of an inside look at what she loves in a fic. The prompt was "All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again" (Ecclesiastes 3:20)/"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" (Book of Common Prayers)".  
> I tried to squeeze in themes of entropy, change, sight and the phenomena of coming just short of having what you want, because you love these themes but also because these concepts seem to always live in our DMs. Happy holidays, my dear. I hope you enjoy!!

When you were a child, you wondered why the world seemed to be dying.

This was before you knew how deep your hatred of the Ninth House ran, before you understood how uneven the ground you stood upon was, and certainly before you had any idea of who - or what - you are. You only saw humans become skeletons, snow leeks wither and die, and Harrow’s parents age and age and age, as if some tide of favor was turning away from them.

“Ashes to ashes, or whatever they say,” is all Aiglamene grumbles when you tell her of your noticings. “We come from dust, and we’ll go back to it eventually. Our bodies decay and then out come the bones, ready to be used for whatever the House needs.”

You think that’s fair. You know they think you’re a waste, anyway, so maybe at least your body could go to good use.

You think about this often as you grow up, as you watch the scales of the Ninth House’s quality of life tip from degrading to deteriorating, as you watch Harrowhark and Pelleamena and Priamhark fall apart in varying stages. As you grow and learn and Harrow shrinks and learns. 

When you reach Canaan House, you’re assaulted by life and green and change, the opposite of the decay you’ve known all your life, and part of you wonders at how awful it is to be able to easily picture how this place would look covered in dust and decay. It’s the way of things. It’s how you know, in retrospect, that nothing good can happen here. Anything that’s stayed alive this long can’t be a good thing.

* * *

Perhaps it’s heretical that you do not believe in miracles. Probably, since you’re God’s child or whatever. 

That, as you say, buck-fucking-wild realization aside, not much has changed. You’re still trapped inside a body that is not yours, you’re still floating somewhere between dream and waking, alive or dead, and the girl who abandoned you in this shell is still just beyond your reach.

It’s not for lack of trying; you’ve been standing over this glass coffin for what could be hours, days, or weeks. You’ve beaten your fists against it, tapped, shouted, cursed, kicked, but nothing. Would that you had your sword with you, though something tells you the blade wouldn’t pierce your necromancer’s resting place.

Finally, you sit and look upon her in despair, and you’re not even a little surprised when you start to laugh. If you had a weapon with you there would be some irony here; as you fell on the blade of your own loyalty, so she fell on the blade of her own wounded heart. And now her body feeds the River as buried bodies feed plants with roots deep in the ground.

You see her, as through a glass dimly, with her chest rising and falling, her eyelids still and impassive against cool cheeks, and you wonder if this is the same wonder she felt when beholding the girl in the tomb.

Probably. Serves you right for waiting. Serves Harrow right for leaving you. Serves you both right for trying and failing.

You watch your necromancer for a while, only a little creeped out by the fact that there are essentially two of her - you can see your-slash-Harrow’s face reflected in the glass, but there she is, laying there in some kind of repose. Wack. 

And then, you see  _ her _ .

Something tells you this is the woman who came to Harrow many nights on the Mithraeum who listened to your necromancer speak and bleed and cry out, and did nothing. You behold this woman, with her sword and shackles, and you want nothing more than to rip her apart.

Instead, you stand. “You’re her. Harrow calls you The Body,” you say, dumbly. “The woman in the tomb.”

She looks at you and says nothing. There’s something in her gait that is wrong, something in her eyes and face and hands that speaks of decay, in direct - and ironic - contrast to Harrow’s steadily-rising chest.

“You’re her,” she says, and you nearly jump. She tilts her head, those eyes never leaving yours. “I know those eyes.”

You say nothing. You simply look, and she looks back, and eventually she looks down at herself, as if surprised.

“Her House is dying.” She nods at Harrowhark’s body, and you want to yell.

“You’re dying too,” you snap, “and it’s  _ our  _ House.”

She tilts her head again, lank hair splashing over her shoulders. It’s as if she’s decaying before your very eyes; if you reached over the coffin to touch her, you suspect she may come apart under your hands.

“Where is your body, Gideon Gaius?” she intones, sounding freakishly like the great-aunts in tone and resonance. “Why are you trapped inside another woman’s tomb?”

“My name is Gideon Nav.” Your hands spasm, as if for a sword. “And if I knew where my body was, do you seriously think I’d still be in  _ this _ ?” You look down at Harrow’s coffin. “No offense, my lady of macabre darkness. But you have zero muscles. It’s sad.”

The smile the woman from the tomb gives in response is somehow both pitying and chiding. “Oh sweet girl, you know not what you are. You know not what you have done.”

“I don’t need to know,” you snap. “I’m not  _ his  _ daughter, any more than Harrow is his hands and gestures, or whatever the fuck-”

“That’s not what I meant,” she says evenly, and a crumbling hand reaches for the coffin. You smack it away without thinking, and flakes of skin drift off into the River’s unseen, unfelt wind. “Everything here dies. But you, Gideon... you have lived. You are a living, breathing creature inside a mausoleum that is sleeping inside a burial ground.”

You say nothing. Harrow’s little bird-sized chest is heaving under the weight of your rage. “Ashes to ashes,” the woman muses, “but that’s not how this universe dies.”

You can’t see me, but the woman must now be able to; she looks at me with clear eyes and says, “Oh. You.”

I nod, once. I roll up on the balls of my feet, then back down. An instinct born from years of training and thinking. “Yes.”

“Have you worked out who I am?”

“Almost,” I say.

She tilts her head. “Such a loyal cavalier. Nigella would be proud.” And then the world contracts in on itself, leaving you and your mirror-image girl in the coffin behind.

* * *

I wake up and nearly smack my head on Corona’s. We’re still on the tile floor, the cool ceramic providing a small, grounding comfort. I don’t let it get to me, but the gunfire outside is always a little unsettling, if only because my blades offer nothing by way of protection from bullets.

“Where did you go?” Corona asks, eyes narrow and jealous.

I press my hands flat to the floor and sit up slowly, cautiously. There is only silence, so I sit up until my back is against the bathtub. “The River.” My fingers sting where I touched that woman. Her strange eyes are seared in my memory. Somewhere in my cortex, I feel something stir. 

“I’m forgetting her voice,” Corona sighs into the darkness, apropos of absolutely nothing. When you look at her, her face is tilted away, eyes closed, presenting a tragic profile in the razor-thin slant of light coming in through the curtains. “Have you forgotten his?”

_ Nigella would be proud _ , I hear that voice say. Little is known of Nigella Shodash, little that I can recall anyway, though I assume the Warden has memorized at least a book’s worth on the subject.

I don’t want to think about the entropy of memory. I don’t want to think about how cold the Sixth is or how the Warden used to press his hand to the small of my back when passing behind me. I don’t want to think about how I don’t remember what his shoulder felt like under my hand. I don’t want to miss the rush that came along with our banter. The safety of understanding. Of never being found wanting.

Out of the ash of my loss rises power. Out of the ash of Coronabeth’s loss rises a weapon. Life to death. Death to destruction. Bones become souls. The dead live on in the place where the dead remain.

Only, I think without meaning to, if I die, the Warden will have nowhere to go. It won’t be a flashbang followed by salvage; his soul will be pulled down with me, like a sinking ship and a lone survivor, and he will die. No respite in a locked room. No resting place on the Sixth.

He used to joke about becoming a skeletal servitor after his death in the same fashion as Dr. Donald Sex. These jokes were always accompanied by threats to haunt me via copper wires or bones. I always told him to eat a piece of bread - his least favorite bland meal of all bland meals - and then maybe he’d calm down.

What the Warden likely wouldn’t give to be beside me in the River, beholding the woman you told me had been haunting Nonagesimus for years.

_ The Body.  _ As if summoned by my thought, gold eyes flash open across the room and lock on mine. The entity wearing your body and face winks at me, but says nothing. I think about how wrong it is, how you would have said a half-dozen idiot things to me, and how I would have probably threatened you into silence, or at least said you were brain-dead again. As a joke.

“If Gideon is living in a mausoleum,” I say without thinking, ignoring Coronabeth’s shocked expression, “then what are you? Where do you live?”

“Not all tombs are meant to collect dust,” the voice that isn’t yours says. “Miracles, after all, have been known to disrupt decay.”

“The second law of thermodynamics states that, unless outside energy is provided, a system will find sustained or decaying entropy.” I say it like it’s nothing, because it doesn’t come from me.

The voice that isn’t yours says, “Yes. Good. This must be why you’re the cavalier primary of your House.”

“What do you mean, miracles?” I press.

“It would take a miracle to disrupt that second law,” the person wearing your face muses. “Don’t you think? This body is a tomb, but it is not decaying. It is, in fact, brimming with life. Thalergy, thanergy, it all has a place. John knew that, and this one would if she was raised how she ought to have been.”

Your face now wears an eerie smile. It’s too calm, too confident. “I have worked a miracle, in that I inhabit a body here and in the River. And this body, which cannot die, is a miracle in and of itself. Death could not claim her, and so here we stand.”

* * *

There will come a time when you will meet me in the River on the eve of a battle, and I will tell you I can’t find your sword but you’re welcome to my blades, and you will look at me and ask, wild and helpless, “Camilla, what do I do?”

“Survive,” I will say, because I can, and you will search my face and notice, for the first time, my eyes.

“What happens if you die? To him. To Sex Pal.”

I will cringe at the name, solely on his behalf, because I think it’s a little bit funny. Not that I’ll tell you that. “We’ll die. Dust to the River.” An explosion traded for entropy. Not at all fair, and not at all unexpected.

You will look back at Harrow and touch the coffin with the fingers that are not yours, and I will look at the shifting spaces of the River. “Is it worth the risk?”

I will sigh a sigh I’ve breathed often, and it will feel like exhaling all the stale dust of my fathers’ House. “I hope so.”

“She wouldn’t want me to,” you will say. “He wouldn’t.”

I will clench my jaw, bite down hard on the anger and rage that always accompanies invocations of his name. “He knows me well enough to know I won’t stand away from something that matters this much. And if he had a problem, well, he could always plow to the front of my mind and do something about it.”

This is not the whole truth, but you don’t know that. “Are you two going to be... you know, stuck like that? Forever?”

“I don’t know,” I will say, because Coronabeth asked me the same thing, and that was all the answer I could give. “If I die, he won’t be able to survive. I’m his anchor in the River and his host in the world.”

“No pressure.”

“Something like that.”

You will smile that savage grin I saw in the wreckage of Canaan House, and I will smile back despite myself, because it feels good to let myself want something, even if that thing is blood.

“What hope do we have of winning?” you will ask. 

“None.” I will ready my knives. The soul inside me will shift a little bit and settle in to wait. “Yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Endless gratitude to [heliocharis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliocharis/pseuds/heliocharis) and [Johnny](https://twitter.com/percocetgraves) for their swift and incisive edits. The title of this work is from the Book of Common Prayers.


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